Why Career Quizzes Don’t Have the Answers for You

You may have spent some time in the past taking online quizzes to help you figure out what is the best career option for you. Many people have so many things that they want to do with their lives that it can be difficult to find the perfect career path.

Because of this, there are many career quizzes that are said to help you out with choosing your path. Unfortunately, many of them do nothing more than give you a few minutes of amusement. They may help you understand what options you have, but realistically they can’t tell you the perfect career for you.

Incomplete Answer Options

None of these quizzes can give you the option of the perfect answer. You are tied into one of a few, pre-programmed answers. Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way, and neither do people. Because of this, these quizzes are completely inaccurate. If a quiz asks you if you prefer to work with others or alone, for example, there are usually just two answers: alone, or with others. This does not take into account the complexity of a true answer. Only allowing one or two options cuts the opportunity for a true answer down even more.

Variability of Answers

Many times, your answers to these quizzes will depend on your mood that day. Because of this, you can get one career path one day and a completely different one another day. This can be frustrating, especially if you are trying to find the perfect career for yourself.

Variety of “Perfect Careers”

There are two problems with the career options that these quizzes come up with. First, some quizzes only have a very limited amount of responses for possible careers (like “medicine” or “communications,” rather than having specialties). There are so many career options out there that it is frustrating to find out that the quiz only has 5 or 6 careers listed.

On the other hand, some quizzes will give you a huge variety of options that they feel might work for you. If you are already trying to decide between different types of careers, and the quiz you take lists 10 to 15 different career choices from your answers, you can feel even more confused than when you started.

CONCLUSION

Taking career quizzes can be a fun thing to do, but for the majority of people, this is as far as you should take it. These quizzes are not the be-all, end-all of your options for a career. Talking to a career councilor, job shadowing someone, or making a decision based off of what you are interested in, is a much better option for most people.

With not enough flexibility available for these quizzes, and many more career paths open to you than what they may have in the database, you will want to take the responses that you get from these quizzes with a grain of salt.

Sure, quizzes are a fun way to spend some time, but do you really want to trust your career to that? There are so many interesting and unusual careers available, you’re sure to find one that is right for you. Which career are you most interested in pursuing?